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Jack Altman
@jaltma
Partner @Benchmark. Previously founded Alt Cap and Lattice.
631 Following    284.6K Followers
Huge congrats to @lqiao and Fireworks 🧨 Insane company and team
Every company must own its intelligence. We've raised $1.5B Series D at a $17.5B valuation. We’ve surpassed $1B ARR and serve over 40 trillion tokens daily, with 95%+ coming from models specialized on customer data. We’re just getting started. More:
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A counterintuitive thing about the AI cycle is how things that you'd think should kill startups keep turning out to be tailwinds. Labs are good at code -> Cursor, Cog, Lovable, etc Labs are security gods -> security cos crush Frontier beats OSS -> inference startups go nuts Etc
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Sam makes the case for why startups should invest much more time and capital into brand, and lays out what he's doing at Monaco. Demand gen is always easier to justify, but a lot of the software companies I respect most like Rippling, Ramp, Figma etc have clearly prioritized it.
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I sat down with @samdblond, founder of Monaco, to talk about to talk about the future of sales and GTM in the AI era. He's an incredible GTM leader and founder and I get new ideas every time I talk to him. Hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (1:26) Sam's sales journey (3:11) EchoSign learnings (5:28) Building Zenefits GTM (7:02) Parker's 0 to $10M thought exercise (9:51) Creating a demand-rich environment (14:20) People, brand, and revenue ops (21:19) Why Sam went to Founders Fund (28:00) Starting Monaco (29:40) Salesforce’s innovator's dilemma (31:40) Going straight for the system of record (34:30) Disrupting labor (41:10) Pricing in an AI-native environment (44:28) The Monaco GTM playbook (50:06) The $60,000 plane experiment (54:21) Creative campaigns vs. paid advertising (1:00:06) Monaco’s product approach (1:03:13) Advice for founders just starting to sell (1:07:58) Abundant pipeline and the right to say no
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Very proud of Saam and the Greylock team, who are some of the best in the game ❤️
Today, we are announcing Greylock 18, a new $1.5 billion early-stage venture fund. A company begins when a founder sees a future others cannot yet see. There is no team, product, or revenue. Only a deep insight and the courage to start. Being early is lonely work. For years, being right can look exactly like being wrong. Greylock has spent more than six decades partnering with founders through those earliest moments to build enduring companies. Airbnb, Facebook, and Palo Alto Networks all began as improbable ideas driven by founders determined to make them inevitable. AI has made the map blank again. Every part of the economy is now open to reinvention. We believe many of the defining AI companies do not yet exist. We invest selectively and partner deeply with the founders we back. Each Greylock partner makes only one or two new investments a year because the work demands depth. We bring the full attention, network, and resources of Greylock to every partnership. We are builders backing outliers. Founders have their choice of investor. When a founder chooses to partner with Greylock, we understand the weight of that choice and the profound responsibility that comes with it. We seek to be a founder’s first believer and long-term partner. Greylock 18 is our commitment to what does not exist yet.
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Something Sam learned with Parker Conrad is the importance of creating a demand-rich GTM environment. When you don't have enough leads, every deal is too precious, so targets can be easily be missed and more importantly reps might try to close bad-fit deals.
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I sat down with @samdblond, founder of Monaco, to talk about to talk about the future of sales and GTM in the AI era. He's an incredible GTM leader and founder and I get new ideas every time I talk to him. Hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (1:26) Sam's sales journey (3:11) EchoSign learnings (5:28) Building Zenefits GTM (7:02) Parker's 0 to $10M thought exercise (9:51) Creating a demand-rich environment (14:20) People, brand, and revenue ops (21:19) Why Sam went to Founders Fund (28:00) Starting Monaco (29:40) Salesforce’s innovator's dilemma (31:40) Going straight for the system of record (34:30) Disrupting labor (41:10) Pricing in an AI-native environment (44:28) The Monaco GTM playbook (50:06) The $60,000 plane experiment (54:21) Creative campaigns vs. paid advertising (1:00:06) Monaco’s product approach (1:03:13) Advice for founders just starting to sell (1:07:58) Abundant pipeline and the right to say no
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I sat down with @samdblond, founder of Monaco, to talk about to talk about the future of sales and GTM in the AI era. He's an incredible GTM leader and founder and I get new ideas every time I talk to him. Hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (1:26) Sam's sales journey (3:11) EchoSign learnings (5:28) Building Zenefits GTM (7:02) Parker's 0 to $10M thought exercise (9:51) Creating a demand-rich environment (14:20) People, brand, and revenue ops (21:19) Why Sam went to Founders Fund (28:00) Starting Monaco (29:40) Salesforce’s innovator's dilemma (31:40) Going straight for the system of record (34:30) Disrupting labor (41:10) Pricing in an AI-native environment (44:28) The Monaco GTM playbook (50:06) The $60,000 plane experiment (54:21) Creative campaigns vs. paid advertising (1:00:06) Monaco’s product approach (1:03:13) Advice for founders just starting to sell (1:07:58) Abundant pipeline and the right to say no
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YC still produces great companies at such a high rate that I think it has to somehow be causal. They obviously have great pattern matching and pick well too, but I think the only way to have such a high hit rate from such early stage companies must be that it changes the odds.
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One of the weird constants about YC is that the disses are always the same. Investors always claim valuations have become impossibly high. Competitors always claim we've jumped the shark because the batch sizes are now too big. Historically both have always been mistaken.
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Mercor grew from $1M to $2B in ARR in 24 months. This is the fastest growth trajectory in history. While everyone knows about AI lab investments in the Task Economy, our fastest-growing segment is Enterprise.
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Fun convo with some great people/ex-colleagues :)
We had a very sobering conversation around chip fabrication vis a vis China and Taiwan. Trae talked about how America does great work around chip design, which is the (relatively) easier part of the problem, but how the fabrication lives elsewhere and why that's a problem.
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New episode of Uncapped with @traestephens and @zebulgar from Founders Fund, and my partner @EverettRandle. We talked about Founders Fund, the role of VCs, operating versus investing, their current views on the market, and dynamics in the AI supply chain and China. The conversation stayed almost entirely on the rails and as always I learned a bunch from the way they think. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:54) What makes FF unique (8:01) Why lacking EQ can be an asset (12:10) Delian on working with Keith (18:30) Why Trae hates board meetings (24:13) Benchmark vs. Founders Fund (26:31) Investing as the exhaust of operating (28:52) Venture as a micro asset class (30:42) The infamous 2021 offsite (34:21) Current market sentiment (39:18) Can you beat the S&P? (48:53) America's semiconductor blind spot (51:56) Taiwan and the 90% probability (57:58) Robotics, humanoids, and the China question
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"I am very uncomfortable, I am not enjoying this moment at all...we're getting back to this point where prices are untethered from reality and it reminds me a lot of 2021." Trae and FF have been among the best hard tech investors in the business, so it was interesting to hear him say that hard tech may be in an even more exuberant moment than AI.
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New episode of Uncapped with @traestephens and @zebulgar from Founders Fund, and my partner @EverettRandle. We talked about Founders Fund, the role of VCs, operating versus investing, their current views on the market, and dynamics in the AI supply chain and China. The conversation stayed almost entirely on the rails and as always I learned a bunch from the way they think. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:54) What makes FF unique (8:01) Why lacking EQ can be an asset (12:10) Delian on working with Keith (18:30) Why Trae hates board meetings (24:13) Benchmark vs. Founders Fund (26:31) Investing as the exhaust of operating (28:52) Venture as a micro asset class (30:42) The infamous 2021 offsite (34:21) Current market sentiment (39:18) Can you beat the S&P? (48:53) America's semiconductor blind spot (51:56) Taiwan and the 90% probability (57:58) Robotics, humanoids, and the China question
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Ev and Jack thanked me like 5 times for not overly bashing Benchmark in this I'm not sure if that means this podcast is good or banal, but hey we had some fun
New episode of Uncapped with @traestephens and @zebulgar from Founders Fund, and my partner @EverettRandle. We talked about Founders Fund, the role of VCs, operating versus investing, their current views on the market, and dynamics in the AI supply chain and China. The conversation stayed almost entirely on the rails and as always I learned a bunch from the way they think. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:54) What makes FF unique (8:01) Why lacking EQ can be an asset (12:10) Delian on working with Keith (18:30) Why Trae hates board meetings (24:13) Benchmark vs. Founders Fund (26:31) Investing as the exhaust of operating (28:52) Venture as a micro asset class (30:42) The infamous 2021 offsite (34:21) Current market sentiment (39:18) Can you beat the S&P? (48:53) America's semiconductor blind spot (51:56) Taiwan and the 90% probability (57:58) Robotics, humanoids, and the China question
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The largest, frontier OAI model at nearly 750 tps on Cerebras! "We're also launching GPT‑5.6 Sol on Cerebras at up to 750 tokens per second in July, bringing frontier intelligence to customers at unprecedented speed."
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From our initial investment when we led the Series A to today, this incredible team continues to democratize access to financial instruments by abstracting away complexity that's existed for decades. Fomo's execution is simply remarkable.
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Congratulations to the entire Cursor team! Truly a remarkable team, product, and company. It was an extraordinary privilege for us at Benchmark to have invested in this incredible company. There is no doubt that they will continue to shape the future of AI with SpaceX!
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The new startup go-to-market playbook. If you’re a startup founder or sales leader, this will help you accelerate revenue growth. Thanks for having me on @ThePeelPod, @TurnerNovak !!
My conversation with Mike Volpi @mavolpi, who is one of the strongest early stage investors of the last decade backing companies like Scale, ClickHouse, Confluent, Wealthfront, and many others. When I started investing a couple years ago, Mike was one of the first people I reached out to for advice. Since then he's started his own new firm, Hanabi. We talked about creating a new VC firm, how AI impacts venture capital, and a bunch of his ideas around specific trends in AI and elsewhere. I love this conversation, hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:39) Building a venture firm from scratch (4:02) Designing Hanabi (5:52) Why stage matters less (9:38) Building a venture brand (13:58) The role of board seats (17:06) Attributes of enduring firms (20:44) The future of AI labs (23:14) Open-source and neolabs (32:49) The compute race (36:51) The future of software (45:49) Investing in defense (47:50) From operator to investor (50:35) Thriving founders today
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One thing that took me a while to learn is if you are recruiting someone to your early stage startup and they are also interviewing at huge companies, everyone is better off if you just stop the process.
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